The Web today is one of the world's most important information and communications technologies (ICTs). It has steadily become fundamental to the way people and organisations access information, document knowledge and maintain records, in a wide range human activities from business to education. Next to paper, the web is arguably the second most universally accessible medium for preserving and transmitting the information and knowledge that is recordable in different human languages. Today, people all over the world read, communicate, share and interact with recorded data, on web pages available over the computer networks distributed across the globe.
Technically, the web is an electronic medium providing key mechanisms and a platform by which computers serve to mediate human communication. The term ‘Web’ is taken here to encompass all implementations of interlinked hypermedia resources delivered via the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), whether hosted over the Internet (World Wide Web) or in intranets (local Webs). Its electronic nature means it enables speedy access to information resources as well as interactive modalities and features through which people can create, use and share information.
The web began as a platform for publishing information in a shared space accessible to a community of practitioners. It has developed over a decade from being a huge mass of interconnected hypermedia documents to a very rich and dynamic medium supporting communication across individuals, businesses, institutions, governments and cultures. Search engines, webmail, community forums, portal sites and more recently weblogs are some of the key web applications that have been responsible for the social impact and utility of the web.
Web Usability Issues
The fundamental task involved in people's use of the web is the creation, publishing and maintenance of content. This content takes a variety of forms—the various representations of information needed and used by people; and the web comprises an array of technologies, protocols, mark-up languages etc to facilitate the underlying processes of their storage, delivery and presentation. Text is by far the most predominant of these forms and is found on virtually every webpage on the internet. The huge potential arises given that web technology enables this content to be interactive, through a variety of mechanisms.
Given its global significance for communications, it is essential that solutions are sought to address the problems individuals have in using web-based means to create messages and share content. Broadly, the digital divide issues of the 21st century, present a significant challenges to global utilisation of the web. These issues concern the imbalances in physical access to web-based technology, as well as the imbalances in resources and skills to effectively utilise the web for human interactive and collaborative purposes. This is reflected particularly in the relative inability of people in developing world contexts to easily create and distribute content over the internet in their local languages.
There are a number of aspects to this problem:                Firstly, there are hard factors involved—the physical, infrastructural and economic factors constraining the availability of appropriate hardware, affecting to enable people use the web.        Also there are soft factors—the availability of appropriately designed resources and tools to interact over the web. The issue here is how well their features are adapted to the natural capabilities and understanding of people in any specific context. These arise from the basic design of web-based resources, but the resultant effect in the skill requirement for creating messages and content using web technologies.        
There is thus a design imperative calling for better techniques and mechanisms for interacting with information, in order to make web applications and systems more usable. The significance of appropriately designed web resources is all the more apparent in the fact that web browsers are supporting a greater part of the interaction between humans and electronic devices of various types. There is today a proliferation of web-based user interfaces.
Web-Based Communication Issues
Web page documents have traditionally been taken as the primary unit of the storage and delivery of web content. For publishing purposes, documents could be taken as the primary content being shared amongst the parties involved. However for more interactive and communicative purposes, the main content being shared should primarily be regarded as messages. This is usually enabled through web applications.
Communication mediated over the web is also to date largely based on a document delivery approach, where individuals using browsers request and receive web pages from hosting servers. This has effectively served information publishing and dissemination purposes. The approach however has the effect of limiting interactivity, because:
(i) a user has to handle information one whole web page at a time, often having to scan through them for relevant information and
(ii) the interaction process is punctuated by page fetching and reloads, which could take significant amounts of time depending on the size and complexity of the page requested, as well as network bandwidth and traffic.
Also, the problem of spam arises because the boundary for a domain of communication cannot be effectively controlled, a fact which is evident in email and other forms of internet-driven communication tools.
Web Information Storage and Retrieval Issues
Much of the problem of enabling computers to effectively retrieve information needed by users has to do with the way the information is typically stored i.e. in documents containing unstructured content. This results mainly in information overload, whereby a lot of the information retrieved by search engines is irrelevant to the user's immediate need. A related aspect of this issue is that specifying the right query terms in order to retrieve content requires considerable skill. Alternative search technologies based on natural language have recently begun to be investigated and developed to address this problem.